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Although he left school at fourteen to work as an upholsterer and
cabinet-maker, Walter White (1811 93) would spend forty years
working in the library of the Royal Society. White was mostly
self-taught, a voracious reader who also learnt German, French, and
Latin, and a diligent attender at lectures and other events
offering self-improvement. After a brief emigration to the United
States, he returned to Britain in 1839, and was offered a post as
'attendant' in the Royal Society's library in 1844; this led to his
cataloguing much of the collection, and in 1861 he was appointed
Librarian. He became acquainted with many of the Society's members,
including Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin, and Lord Tennyson. These
journals, published posthumously by his brother in 1898, begin with
a brief account of his early years before charting his intellectual
progress and career, ending in the year he retired, 1884.
In 1926, Walter White, then assistant secretary of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People, broke the story
of an especially horrific triple lynching in Aiken, South Carolina.
Aiken was White's forty-first lynching investigation in eight
years. He returned to New York drained by the experience. The
following year he took a leave of absence from the NAACP and, with
help from a Guggenheim grant, spent a year in France writing Rope
and Faggot. Ironically subtitled "A Biography of Judge Lynch, "
Rope and Faggot is a compelling example of partisan scholarship and
is based on White's first-hand investigations. It was first
published in 1929.
The book met two important goals for White: it debunked the "big
lie" that lynching punished black men for raping white women and
protected the purity of "the flower of the white race, " and it
provided White with an opportunity to deliver a penetrating
critique of the southern culture that nourished this form of blood
sport. White marshaled statistics demonstrating that accusations of
rape or attempted rape accounted for less than 30 percent of the
lynchings. Presenting evidence of white females of all classes
crossing the color line for love -- evidence that white
supremacists themselves used to agitate whites to support
anti-miscegenation laws -- White insisted that most interracial
unions were consentual and not forced. Despite the emphasis on
sexual issues in instances of lynching, White also argued that the
fury and sadism with which the mob attacked victims had more to do
with keeping blacks in their place and with controlling the black
labor force. Some of the strongest sections of the book deal with
White's analysis of theeconomic and cultural foundations of
lynching.
Walter White's powerful study of a shameful practice in modern
American history is now back in print, with a new introduction by
Kenneth Robert Janken.
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